Cultural analysis in 60 minutes or less

Category Archives: Holidays

This graduation season, you’ve almost certainly sat through one of the worst literary genres, the commencement speech.[i] Yes, David Foster Wallace achieved greatness with his:

And there is always Kurt Vonnegut’s Wear Sunscreen speech. But most speakers are shackled by the speech’s conventions.

They begin with a list of thank-you’s:

I want to thank all of the students, the parents, the professors, the college president, the board of trustees…

With a little self-deprecation…

…for letting me have this opportunity to speak with your class. You’re a great audience, especially since you can’t go anywhere!

Followed by the story: narrating a personal obstacle that the speaker overcame…

…I may be the CEO of Ceo Industries now, but it wasn’t always that way…

…in order to laud the role of education in that success…

…In fact, when I first came to college, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I struggled with finding…

…while being optimistic, preferably with some Speech 101 rhetorical flourish:

…But I did know that I wanted to make a change. A change for the better. A change for the future. A change for myself. A change for the world.[ii]

And, of course, a quotation from someone famous to wrap:

Because after all, as Gandhi famously said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Except much longer. You’re welcome.

Once in a while, someone makes news by violating the tacit agreement that speeches need to stay positive, like last year’s “You are not special. You are not exceptional” speech by David McCullough. But a commencement speech seems to me an inopportune time to lay too much on the caps of the newly minted graduates.

For me, the problem may be, as usual for Hourman, time. We keep thinking of commencement as “the ceremony of conferring degrees or granting diplomas at the end of the academic year.”

But it’s easy to forget that commencement means beginning. Not end.

Commencement has turned into a phantonym, one of those words like inflammable that means one thing but seems to mean its opposite. Of course, we want to mark the end of college, the completion of the degree, even though many students have expressed some ambivalence about the ceremony when they know that they’re set to start graduate school almost immediately after finishing college.[iii]

So for many students, it’s not an end at all. But is it a beginning? What is it the beginning of, exactly? For cynics who think that school is not real life, ending the year means entering the real world. But that never seemed right to me, given how much real life so many students have already experienced. It’s not entering adulthood, which in many ways has also already begun for them, even as many people don’t see college graduation as the mark of official adulthood anyway, preferring marriage, or children, or, in my case, the purchase of real estate, which seemed more difficult to get out of than either of the others.

So let’s have two cheers for commencement, even commencement speeches. We need to impose all sorts of beginning and endings to portion our time: day and night, even though they start at different times for different people in different parts of the world and year; the year itself, although it too is an arbitrary marker; the seasons, although they are cyclical and, this year, totally inconsistent. We want to imagine that time, like the seasons, is consistent and linear—time flies like an arrow[iv], straight and in a single direction, when the way time and life[v] feel is more amorphous, scarily circular, or even sometimes unchanging, so that once in a while I’m surprised to see my older-than-24-year-old face uncannily staring back at me in the mirror.

Without the decorative sign posts and pit stops—our commencements to celebrate what we would love to think of as the beginning of post-collegiate life, or the end of pre-collegiate life; the candles taking up more room on the cake each year; a wedding and subsequent anniversaries—life becomes a series of one damned thing after another. A grim death march. No wonder we’re implored in commencement speeches to see life as about the journey and not the destination. We don’t want to go there.

Because in the beginning, and in the end, there is only one real beginning, and one ending, and we can’t remember either one of them. Let’s celebrate the rituals we have, not in spite of the clichés, but because of them. The speeches are trite, but maybe they’re the right ones for the occasion. And maybe, ideally, they even contain some truths. Unlike Kurt Vonnegut’s sunscreen speech, which he didn’t write and wasn’t ever a real speech. Unlike Gandhi’s famous quotation, which he never said.

Time: 65 minutes. Wasted too much looking for links.

[i] Being that I have attended thirteen graduation ceremonies that I can remember, I believe I’m in some position to evaluate them.

Like this:

Outside my bedroom window, flickering like a cheap motel sign, sits my neighbor’s neon Santa, silently signing “Ho,” “Ho Ho,” “Ho Ho Ho,” each flash adding another “Ho” like it’s a new idea or something. The image of Santa—Saint Nick, Kris Kringle, Father Christmas—reigns supreme from November to January, or, in Winona, MN, from late August to January.

But what about Krampus? Apparently, Krampus—who, like Santa, goes by many names—was once, more benignly, Santa’s sidekick, “a devil-like figure who drove away evil spirits during the Christian holiday season.” But more often, he was Santa’s bad cop. Santa rewarded the good children with presents, while Krampus whipped and punished the bad ones—or, in a calculated bit of symmetry, Santa carried presents in his sack, while Krampus carried an empty sack, not to steal presents a la The Grinch but rather to carry off bad children for his supper.

I never heard of Krampus until two days ago. And I don’t celebrate Christmas, so I don’t have a horse in this race anyway. But I’ve been thinking about Krampus. (I also had a dream about him, but my stomach hurt when I went to bed, so I suspect it was my unconscious telegraphing the word “cramps.”) I’m concerned about what seems to be the disappearance of Krampus. Santa has come to dominate the season with a red, velvet fist, the sole survivor of a symbolic vanishing twin syndrome. But Santa’s ascendancy seems directly tied to the overall criticisms of saccharine sanctimony and crass commercialism endemic to the season.

Too many of the images are startling or sadistic, a few border on pedophilia, and a handful are all three:

Wrong for so many reasons

Clearly, adults should not terrorize their children into petrified obedience. When I posted a Krampus link on Facebook yesterday, two friends, Abbie and Johannes —not surprisingly, of Eastern European and Austrian origin, respectively—had indeed heard of Krampus, and they felt their childhood shivers return at the sight of him. But the appropriate comparison for me is to Andrew Delbanco’s book and idea of “the Death of Satan”: not the need to sow fear, as much as the metaphorical need to embody, rather than rationalize or ironize, the very idea of evil. Delbanco worries that the death of Satan—or, I’ll add, his Christmas collector’s edition, Krampus—is a kind of death of metaphor itself, and that convincing the world that he is gone—whether through secular humanism’s intellectual embarrassment or Christian fundamentalism’s demonizing of others rather than looking inward to find evil—would indeed be Satan’s greatest trick of all. Ridding the world of Krampus does not purge the world of what he represents. As that other great Pagan-derived holiday, Halloween, shows, great good can come from receiving, and even identifying with, the bad.

But mostly, I fear that without Krampus, the yang to his yin, the bitter to his sweet, Santa Claus has had to be both the good cop and the bad cop in one:

“He knows when you are sleeping,

He knows when you’re awake

He knows if you’ve been bad or good…”

Does any verse strike more fear in the hearts of American children? Do we want Santa to embody Foucault’s Panopticon, the totalitarian, police state? When one figure embodies both reward and punishment, carrots and sticks, it does not just effect the death of Satan. It also produces a kind of death of Santa, just a little. Ho ho ho.